Learning things: Books!

For several years now, I have wished that I had a list of all the books I've ever read - it would be so helpful for all my "I think I read a book about ___ but I can't remember what it was called" moments. I kept not starting it because it seemed so onerous, but Ben and I recently heard someone claim to have a mile of bookshelves in their home, which led to a vigorous discussion of whether or not it is possible to read a mile of books in one's lifetime, which led to me finally sitting down and documenting all my reading to try and prove it was possible. It turns out I have no idea how long a mile is, because after listing the 684 books I can remember reading in my life, I'm still only 1.2% of the way to a mile (although I'm 23% of the way to a ton, so maybe I'll aim for that instead).

Once I had the (fairly) complete list of all the books I've read in front of me, I got curious about the breakdown of the authors, since I've been trying to diversify the perspectives I am exposed to. Diversity in publishing is notoriously horrible, as awesome campaigns like We Need Diverse Books and 1000 Black Girl Books have helped bring to light, so I was prepared for it to be bad... but you guys, it was really bad. First, gender:

Time Period	Female Authors
Childhood	39%
High School	18%
College	56%
Post-College to present	37%
Last year only	59%
Overall	37%

To be fair, the percentage of books by female authors I read as a child would have been higher if I counted all 167 Baby-Sitters Club books separately, but that felt like cheating. It's mildly heartening to see that the majority of books I've read in the last year have been written by women, but I really did not expect that barely over a third of the books I've read in my entire life have been by women. And I'm pretty sure all the women have been cis - I don't think I've read a single book by a trans person, and that's a problem. (I also want to know what share of the authors I've read have been gay or bi, but I'm not sure how to figure that out - I suppose I could identify all the authors who are publicly out and assume the rest are straight? That feels weird but I haven't yet thought of a better way.)

Okay, now race. When I wasn't sure about an author's race I'd check their wikipedia page, which led me to notice that wikipedia identifies the race of people of color but not white people (i.e. authors of color are identified with labels like "Black" or "Mexican-American," but white authors either have no label or are just "American" or "British"). That wasn't particularly surprising, but is a nice little example of white being the assumed norm. Here's the race breakdown:

Time Period	Asian American	Black	Latin@	Middle Eastern	Native	White
Childhood	0.6%	1.8%	0.6%	0%	0%	97.0%
High  School	0%	3.7%	0%	1.2%	0%	95.1%
College	1.4%	2.9%	2.9%	11.4%	1.4%	80.0%
Post-College	1.6%	21.0%	2.1%	3.1%	0.5%	71.7%
Last year only	2.4%	27.5%	0%	0%	0%	70.0%
Overall	1.0%	9.5%	1.4%	3.0%	0.4%	84.8%

I was really surprised at how high the share of white authors was for my childhood - until I realized that a lot of the books featuring characters of color I remembered were actually written by white people (same goes for a surprising number of children's books with female protagonists being written by men) - for example, I remember the strong female Native protagonist from Island of the Blue Dolphins, but that book was actually written by a white man. And while I wouldn't say that authors should only be allowed to write about characters who share their gender and race, I would say that it's a problem when the only "Native voice" accessible isn't actually Native, especially when there are many Native children's authors who have a harder time getting published than their white counterparts.

The white male dominance of my high school reading wasn't surprising, given the white male dominance of the "classics" that comprise most assigned reading during that period. I do remember really not liking a lot of those books, though - so many white boys coming of age under various circumstances really got tedious after awhile. In retrospect I'm lucky that I developed a healthy love of reading outside of school, or that would probably have really turned me off of it.

While the share of authors of color I read has been steadily increasing, breaking it out like this makes me realize I need to pay attention beyond just looking for books by authors who aren't white. Specifically, I haven't read a book by a Latin@, Middle Eastern, or Native person in the last year, and the share of Asian American authors is not much better. And to be clear - my motivation here is not diversity for diversity's sake, it's that I know I am missing some fantastic writing by only reading authors from one narrow band of the human experience. For example - last year a friend turned me on to Octavia Butler, whose work I quickly became obsessed with because it is a type of sci-fi I didn't even know could exist. It's riveting and beautiful and though-provoking in ways that were entirely new for me, and I don't have any doubt that it's informed by her experience as a Black woman and couldn't have been produced by someone without that perspective.

I'm not going to swear off reading white and/or male authors forever, or even for a specific time period, but I am going to be much more intentional about only reading books by those authors when there is a specific reason to. I've got a few lists of great authors of color and female authors I'm going to work my way through (seriously, just google "best Asian authors" or "scifi books by women" or whatever you want - the internet will provide), and I can't wait. I know approaching my reading in this way will broaden my horizons and help push me past the limits of my own experiences, but even more importantly, I know it will lead me to some fantastic books that I otherwise would have missed out on.